In America, no one can hear you scream

Guest blogger Parker Lancaster marks the 4th of July by looking at 'Democracy in America', the classic 1835 work from Alexis de Tocqueville, and at democracy in America today.

“Vote: n.The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of
himself and a wreck of his country.”

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

As all small-d democrats the world over know, democracy is a
government of choices. And not easy choices, like Paul or John, Coke or Pepsi,
In n Out or Shake Shack, Mom or Dad (where my children of divorce at, y’all?).
Taking the fate of one’s country and community in one’s hands is no easy task,
and no small responsibility. For an informed citizen at the ballot box, choices
are often difficult and sometimes morally compromising. It’s legitimately hard
work to find reliable sources of information and study every measure and
proposition. It’s exhausting trying to find CVs, platforms, endorsements, and
voting and campaign contribution records for every candidate for President,
Senate, House, Governor, State Assembly, Deputy County Commissioner,
Comptroller, District Attorney, Assistant District Attorney, Assistant to the Assistant District Attorney,
Assistant to the Regional Manager...you get the picture.

Participating in a democracy is inconvenient (mostly by design) and
more often than not, the payoff for investing dozens of hours of research into
your ballot is to have most or all your people and issues lose, and lose hard
(while you’re at it, world, why not send a cloud over to rain only on me?). But this is, as they say,
decidedly a First World problem. Regardless of how often I lose, and even if I
lose every political battle for the rest of my life, I’m still glad to have a
voice and a choice. Every fight has winners, losers, and plenty of lip-licking
spectators who had nothing better to do than watch more courageous people get
hurt. If monarchies, aristocracies, and castes are passive systems for their
subjects, with virtually every major life decision already made for everyone at
birth, then democracy is an active one, full of risk, adventure, and free will,
and it requires everyone to put a little skin in the game.

Democracy is a power that we, the people, have deliberately and
painstakingly entrusted to ourselves after millennia of inferior, immoral,
irrational, and unjust political systems the world over. But like all great
powers, it can be a double edged sword. A responsible citizenry can be a
sheepdog, standing tall, selfless, and vigilant to protect the herd, with
glossy coat of well-groomed hair gloriously whipping in the wind from atop its
high rocky sunset perch for an epic helicopter shot. Or it can be a rabid,
cross-eyed, cackling chimpanzee with a huge scar across its face, an AK-47 in
one hand, a Molotov cocktail in the other, and a big fat stogie in its mouth.
In America, we’ve chosen the latter path. It’s over, folks. It’s all over.
We’ve jumped the shark. We’ve gone full chimp. We’ve gone fishing. We’ve gone
coocoo for Cocoa Puffs. This is America now. Don’t pray. It won’t work. Either
God is dead or he hates us with the hot hot heat of a trillion quasars.

As befitting our self-destructive human nature, there comes a time
in the history of most democratic nations wherein the skies turn red and
reality is subsumed by unending waking nightmare that curdles the blood,
quickens the beatings of the heart, disquiets and distempers the brain, and
makes men’s minds unsound. Owing to an avalanche of fatal institutional
mistakes, flaws, and corruption far too long to list here, and some stretching
back even to the founding of the nation, the American people recently found
themselves with just two “viable” and “practical” choices, both of which
happened to be malodorous, revolting, hissing sewer rats.

But not all sewer rats are created equal. Some are just your run of
the mill soul-sold hellions, who think and act in accordance with what one
expects from this contemptible species. Others are another breed altogether:
the rare Sumatran giant sewer rat. The kind of rat you might lift the toilet
lid one day to find winking at you and doing casual, lackadaisical backstrokes
in the bowl. And flush him though you may, flush him though you might, over and
over and over again, like the Terminator, he will be back. Like whatever the
thing from It Follows is, he will always be back, each time more sinister and
resolute than before. Like Poe’s maddening raven, he’ll be scratching, tapping
away from inside the bowl at all hours of the dark of night. Like Bob Wiley, as
many times as you think he’s gone, he’s not gone. He’s never gone, and each
time he returns, his wide, sickly, ghastly grin is somehow even wider, more
sickly, more ghastly than before. By some dark elvish magic uttered from a
cursed ancient vellum grimoire written in the blood of the innocent, the
abominable creature is still alive. It’s alive…it’s alive…...it’s alive! It’s
going to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life, with its horrifying
hairpiece and that nasty smile with the pursed-lips kissy face. The prophecies
foretell that only when the Blood Moon rises and the planets are aligned in a
pentagram, such a creature is summoned forth to bubble up from the rancid,
fetid tar pits of hell to be elected Prime Minister of Mixed Metaphors, and
more importantly for our purposes, President of the United States. And worst of all, it will never, ever stop
tweeting.

What to do when faith in one’s country is shaken to the core? We
live under the tiny iron fist of a bonafide fascist, a semi-literate,
breathtakingly incompetent, bedentured McDictator, spray-tanned daily well past
the point of lightheadedness. This lecherous old misogynist and racist
demagogue openly calls for violence against the press, even in the midst of a
nationwide rash of record-breaking mass shootings and massacres (including
against the press). He uses racial slurs against political opponents and puts
immigrant children by the thousands in borderline concentration camps. He blows
through civilian death records and drone strike body counts all over the Middle
East with ease. He despises and mocks fallen and captive American soldiers,
ethnic and religious minorities, women, the poor, the disabled, checks and
balances, judges, due process, and the general principle of the rule of law
that he fetishized so intensely for his credulous voters on the campaign trail.
His enabling administration (a rogues’ gallery of corrupt sycophantic
bootlickers, sociopaths, lobbyists, opportunists, and unlucky children and
in-laws) is just as abhorrent and scaly as the id incarnate whom they serve.
Our government is literally one shocking scandal after another on a daily
basis, in a constant state of constitutional crisis and damage control.

Sadly, this is a problem I don’t think we will be able to blow out
of the airlock (with or without the benefit of a power loader), or cast out of
this mortal plane of existence with a reading from the Necronomicon or a hosing
down with positively-charged ghost goo fished out of the gutters of New York
City. For those who care for the welfare
of their country, a political crisis is a personal crisis as well. And so it is
that I find myself in dire, urgent need of a vacation (or at least a daycation,
or, at the very very least, a
staycation), and a thorough physical and mental delousing. After a shower to
soothe my chemically burned and inflamed skin, a good bender, and a quality
ugly-cry sesh, I sober myself and turn to my trustiest and most reliable old
pals for comfort: books. These days, they make for better companions than my
fellow countrymen. To get some perspective on America’s current predicament,
and to quiet my doubts about the democratic experiment, there is no title more
apropos than Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy
in America.

Tocqueville’s masterpiece, long and detailed as it is, stands in
stark contrast to political analyses of today. Surely owing to social and technological
limitations of the time, and the adolescent state of political science as an
academic discipline, the book is relatively light on hard facts and figures (by
way of example, the first straw poll ever conducted in America was done only 11
years prior to the first volume’s publication). Rather, Tocqueville went the
long way around, geographically and otherwise, and accomplished much of his
research through good old fashioned conversation to get a sense of the American
character and identity. Months and months and months of it, with Americans from
most, if not all, walks of life. Statistics, polls, census data,
meta-data, pie charts, and so on, are
certainly essential to modern political science, but Tocqueville’s book stands
out for how glaringly human it is.
The humanity of the book extends to its author as well, particularly in the
chapters that reveal his own biases and cultural blinders on the issues of
women, slavery, free blacks, and Native Americans. As a comprehensive
boots-on-the-ground documentation of American life, its like was not to be seen
again in America until FDR’s establishment of the ambitious Works Progress
Administration, exactly 100 years after the publication of Democracy in America. It’s a complex work, a literary gumbo of psychology,
sociology, history, ethnography, politics, economics, religion, and more. Many
of his minute observations on human folly and hypocrisy within a particular
political system ring true to this day, and clear as a bell.

Tocqueville’s conclusion that democracy, and likely the republican
kind, was soon to be the way of the world, proved to be true. That republican
democracy is to be America’s future is still true today. We’re the world’s
largest Energizer bunny. We just keep going and going and going. Maybe that
won’t always be the case if we don’t reverse our empirical urges, but it seems
as though democracy is here to stay. Sure, there are some holdouts where they
still haven’t heard of that whole “Enlightenment” thingymabopper. It’s telling
that even the most transparent psychopathic dynastic dictatorship in the world,
North Korea, feels the need to hold sham elections and even go so far as to
call itself a “Democratic People’s Republic” (a remarkable 0 for 3). Though
democracy is and will always be under constant threat of coups, corporate
takeovers, privatization of public institutions, hysterical religious
fundamentalism, and more, it remains the gold standard of governmental
frameworks. These days, it is simply a given that people everywhere expect to
have a say in their own affairs and sovereignty.

There’s a popular delusion on the Right, and even on the Left,
called “American exceptionalism.” This is the notion that God specifically
favors America above all nations in all matters (sorry, all you good people of
Fort Frances, Ontario, you were born only a stone’s throw away from eternal
blessings). I reject this claptrap. If America does have a destiny, then the
clouds on the horizon are dark and heavy indeed. Our “destiny” is less of a
shining city on a hill, and more like a well-used copy of a volume in R.L.
Stine’s late-90’s “Give Yourself Goosebumps” spinoff series (Reader Beware….You
Choose the Scare!!!). That is to say, our national destiny would smell moldy,
be smeared in old pizza grease, and have about 24 possible endings, mostly
involving getting turned into werewolves, giant insects, or being subjected to
wedgies and wet willies for all eternity. You guys believe any fantasy you’d
like. I’ll be over here with my books and I’ll make my own luck, thanks. Parker Lancaster